Agony & Ivy

I wish Chicago Sun-Times columnist Joe Cowley would stick to telling White Sox general manager Ken Williams how to do his job.

In Thursday's Sun-Times, Cowley, a former longtime White Sox beat writer, advised Cubs fans to not get their hopes up in regards to the North Siders signing St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols. He suggested that any Cubs fan who dares dream of Pujols donning a Cubs uniform in 2012 should "pick up the nearest stapler and punch it into your chest to help snap you back to reality."

(Editor's Note: Seventh in a series identifying the 100 worst Cubs of all-time.)

I remember watching the news on Feb. 23, 1979 when Johnny Morris led his sports report with the news that the Cubs had traded Manny Trillo, Greg Gross, and Dave Rader to the Philadelphia Phillies in exchange for Jerry Martin, Barry Foote, and Ted Sizemore. I stopped whatever I was doing and stood in our family room in stunned silence. I was only an 8-year-old third grader, but I knew it was a rotten deal for the Cubs.

Pops is no saint, but I have always been struck by his ability to make friends. It's a testament to his talent for relating to others that a week does not go by when somebody in our neighborhood asks me how he's doing or tells me a story about a good time they had with him.

But the fact that he has been a Cubs fan since at least the 1930s has to be penance for something. The man has been subjected to more bad baseball in his lifetime than anybody else I know and has not even enjoyed the experience of watching his favorite team play in the World Series since 1938. He was serving in the Pacific while the Cubs participated in the 1945 Fall Classic.

"Wait 'til next year!" my late grandmother would mutter whenever she'd hear a Cubs fan speak those words. "It's always wait 'til next year with those Cubs!"